Racism Was Involved in Cambridge Arrest, but Not How You Might Think

There are cries of racism about the arrest of a Harvard professor in Cambridge, MA, and even the president got involved with some stupid statements during last night's press conference. In my opinion there was racism involved, but not the way the politically correct would have you believe. It wasn't a racist cop, but a racist arrestee:

The Cambridge cop prominent Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. claims is a racist gave a dying Reggie Lewis mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in a desperate bid to save the Celtics [team stats] superstar’s life 16 years ago Monday.

“I wasn’t working on Reggie Lewis the basketball star. I wasn’t working on a black man. I was working on another human being,” Sgt. James Crowley, in an exclusive interview with the Herald, said of the forward’s fatal heart attack July 27, 1993, at age 27 during an off-season practice at Brandeis University, where Crowley was a campus police officer.
It’s a date Crowley still can recite by rote - and he still recalls the pain he suffered when people back then questioned whether he had done enough to save the black athlete.

“Some people were saying ‘There’s the guy who killed Reggie Lewis’ afterward. I was broken-hearted. I cried for many nights,” he said.

Crowley, 42, said he’s not a racist, despite how some have cast his actions in the Gates case. “Those who know me know I’m not,” he said.

Yesterday, Lewis’ widow, Donna Lewis, was floored to learn the embattled father of three on the thin blue line of a national debate on racism in America was the same man so determined to rescue her husband.

“That’s incredible,” Lewis, 44, exclaimed. “It’s an unfortunate situation. Hopefully, it can resolve itself. The most important thing is peace.”

Gates, 58, an acclaimed scholar on black history and a PBS documentarian, went on the attack against Crowley on Tuesday, demanding he apologize for arresting him for disorderly conduct last Thursday while investigating a reported break-in at his home. Gates, returning from a trip, was seen by a Malden woman trying to force his front door open. Police alleged he initially refused to identify himself.

Though he harbors no “ill feelings toward the professor,” a calm, resolute Crowley said no mea culpa will be forthcoming.

“I just have nothing to apologize for,” he said. “It will never happen.”

So, the learned professor of "black history" is breaking into a house, refuses to identify himself, and creates a disturbance which draws a crowd. The officer had every right to arrest him and the PD should have left the charges in place instead of shrinking before almighty Harvard. The guy clearly was asking for it, and now that he's been given the national stage, is doing his best, with the help of a president who has racial hang-ups of his own to become the new national race victim.

Obama should have stayed a long way from this case, but even admitting he knew practically nothing about it, he made a dumb statement anyway:

After spending most of an hour patiently reiterating his arguments for changing the health insurance system, President Barack Obama turned his press conference sharply toward an iconic moment in American race relations: The arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. earlier this week by the Cambridge Police.

Gates was arrested for allegedly disorderly conduct -- a charge that was quickly dropped -- after a confrontation with a police officer inside his own home. Though some facts of the case are still in dispute, Obama showed little doubt about who had been wronged.

"I don’t know – not having been there and not seeing all the facts – what role race played in that, but I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two that he Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home," Obama said in response to a question from the Chicago Sun-Times's Lynn Sweet.

Gates, Obama allowed, "is a friend, so I may be a little biased here. I don't know all the facts."

However Gates, he continued, "jimmied his way to get into [his own] house."

"There was a report called in to the police station that there might be a burglary taking place – so far so good," Obama said, reflecting that he'd hope the police were called if he were seen breaking into his own house, then pausing.

As Ben Smith of Politico described it, Obama "went small". Not very presidential, but completely true to form.

The fact that the professor jumped so quickly to charges of racism, even during the arrest itself, tells you all you need to know about this guy's state of mind.

He's a racist. He hates white authority figures and is convinced they share his racist views. And he has the whole community scrambling to keep him placated. Even the Boston Globe has scrubbed his arrest report from their website.

We'll never have a post-racial America as long as guys like Henry Louis Gates Jr. are still polluting our young people's minds at colleges and universities.

And as long as presidents react to racially-tinged stories without having the facts.